Art World in Review (10/28-11/3)

+ On Friday gallerist Edward Winkleman woke up on the wrong side of the bed and wrote The Top Ten Most Useless Art World Lists on his blog, poking fun at the art elite’s obsession with lists, including Artinfo’s “The Love List: Power Couples of the Art World”.

Art power couple Jeberta

+ Arthur Danto, one of the most influential philosophers of art in the United States, died last weekend at the age of 89 in his Manhattan home. He came to prominence with his 1964 article “The Artworld,” in which he posited that it was the community of the art world that deemed what was and wasn’t art, arguing that traditional characteristics no longer defined the art object. His theory was fleshed out in his 1984 book “The End of Art,” prompting generations of misled art students to believe that he said that art no longer existed.

+ On the heels of Danto’s death, the question of what is or isn’t art received institutional leeway when the Guggenheim Museum received a $1.25 million grant from the Mellon Foundation last weekend to realize and recreate conceptual works from the collection of Giuseppe Panza. In the 80s, Panza got into trouble for commissioning works from sketches he had purchased from Donald Judd and other conceptual artists of the 60s and 70s without their permission or participation. The grant is a symbolic move towards answering the question of how to archive conceptual art that does not rely on an authentic original object.

Giuseppe Panza, “enterprising” Italian guy

+ Radu Dogaru wants to sue Rotterdam’s Kunsthal museum for having an inefficient alarm system to prevent him from stealing $24 million dollars in art last year. Had the alarms gone off he would wouldn’t have had to put his mother in the position of claiming that she burned the stolen masterpieces in her country stove. If the museum is found guilty of negligence they will have to split the millions of dollars in restitution that Dogaru is facing. As reported in SFAQ last August.

“If they had a decent alarm, I wouldn’t have had to burn a Matisse!”

+ Nicolas Bourriaud, the father of socially relevant “Relational Aesthetics,” condoned the decision to accept major sponsorship from Ralph Lauren to support the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts of which he is now the director.